Video: Dem Congressional Staffer Thinks His Boss is ‘Lying’ About Her Record, Like Santos

 A Project Veritas video shows a staff member for a Democratic member of Congress saying he thinks his boss has been lying about her background.

Fabricated backgrounds have become a hot issue amid the scandal surrounding Republican Rep. George Santos of New York.

The Twitter video from Project Veritas, a conservative activist group, features Legislative Correspondent Clay Connor Elmore, who works for Democratic Rep. Lauren Underwood of Illinois. In the video, Elmore is asked if Democrats have similar issues to those of Santos.

 

“Absolutely. Everybody is a liar. Between you and me, I feel like my member is lying about being a nurse,” Elmore said. 

Elmore didn’t give specific support for his comment. He went on to say, however, that “even though she has a degree and she was a nurse, but I think the Republicans kept getting her being, like, ‘Oh what’s your actual background,’ so it’s like messy. But I think it’s so ironic that, like, everybody in my office is like, ‘Oh f–k George Santos,’ but at least he’s being honest about his corruption,” Elmore said.

In the 2018 campaign in which he lost his seat to Underwood, Republican Rep. Randy Hultgren said Underwood falsely portrayed herself as working with patients, according to WLS-TV.

In that report, a representative of Underwood said she was on the books as a nurse in Illinois, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, Hultgren said: “To me, posturing as a practicing nurse when in reality that’s not what you are or what you’ve done is a real concern. I think voters have the right to know the truth, to know what someone has really done, and if you look at Underwood’s own resume, you look through line by line, there is no time in her career it appears she could have worked under the eyes of patients.”

Hultgren said Underwood’s campaign ads don’t match her resume.

“Looking into patients’ eyes, that’s what she said. There’s nothing on her resume to say that she’s done that,” Hultgren said. “She’s been twisting it, with the stethoscope, with the scrubs on, in a dentist’s office.” 

“She’s worked as a bureaucrat. She’s worked in Washington, D.C., for the last decade.”

A March 2023 profile of Underwood in The Washington Post said she “spent most of her 20s in Washington, attending leadership training programs while working at the Department of Health and Human Services.”

The profile said that after the Obama administration ended, “she moved home to work at a Medicaid managed-care provider called NextLevel Health.” The profile said she continued to work for the company until her election to Congress in 2018.

In the Project Veritas video this week, Elmore was asked about the differences between his boss and Santos.  

“The difference between Santos and my member is that I’m willing to compromise a lot of my values for this woman who’s there for other black women than George Santos, who doesn’t have a lot of black women in his district,” Elmore said.

“He is there just to flip New York. And I hate him, and I will call him out. But I’ve … very much not called (out) my member, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that my security is there.”